This project is collaborative in essence and will depend on two types of participants in addition to my own work coördinating it.

• Collaborators: Participant-Filmmakers

  The core of this project will be a workgroup of collaborating scholars interested in acquiring filmmaking skills and applying them to academic research. The inital group of people who have expressed interest are students of ethnobotany, but this project has been designed to interest a range of researchers, and may be reshaped as the workgroup forms.

  Collaborators will take part at every level of the project, organizing interviews and producing the material. Individuals may take responsibility for organizing particular food events, effectively becoming the "producers" of those segments of film. During film events a number of collaborators will work together to gather material.

• Consultants: Culinary Practioners

  We will also look for other EWC residents who would like to share their culinary practices with us, as subjects of interviews. While many of the collaborators may also do this, consultants need not commit to the full project to participate — but are encouraged to take part in as much of the process as they would like to, including the editing and analysis of their interviews.

• Coordinator: Principal Investigator and Facilitator:

  This project is being organized and facilitated by David Strauch. As the coordinator of the project, I bring past experience as a political activist to the task of facilitating the group project. Now returning to school to finish a BA in Anthropology (with a minor in Geography) after an almost twenty-year break, I intend to pursue graduate studies in an ethnobotanical field.

  I have previously organized and facilitated group meetings for the Great Peace March, EF!, RAN/RAG, the Cove/Mallard Coalition, and other political and environmental groups. I also led non-violence trainings for some of these groups, incorporating woods-skills training into preparations for environmental direct action. I believe that collective and collaborative work can often be the most creative and effective approach to a problem.

  In 2003 I trained in camera work, editing and production at ‘Ōlelo Community Television, and was certified there as a producer, receiving the August First Work of the Month award for a short film called Bunchy Top. In 2005 I began working for the ethnobotany track at UH, editing video presentations for an online Introduction to Ethnobotany series, and also in that year produced a documentary on Foraging. Students in the Botany Department asked me for advice on filming, which led to the development of a workshop, which I have offered twice at UH and once in Thailand. I look forward to extending that work in this project.